The only thing that Express lacks is convenience features. As I pointed out above, anything you can achieve with Visual Studio, you can also achieve with Notepad.exe and the compiler, which is installed by default in the.NET Framework.
If you do a bit of reading around, the VS team had to fight tooth and nail to get the Express versions released *at all*. They certainly aren't "hobbled", as you can produce fully functional applications with no licensing restrictions on them. It's not like VB6 "Control Creation Edition", which was virtually worthless, you can exercise the full power of the.NET framework, but you might need to write a little extra code for yourself.
Yes, I think that MS are shooting themselves in the foot. But I don't have to agree with their marketing strategy. The issue is that they made an agreement to the effect that you can use their product, just play nice and if you want the advanced features, cough up for them. In some ways I'd prefer that they made VS Professional a free download, but Express for no money at all is a bargain. If you want a free IDE with unrestricted add-in development, there's always SharpDevelop, which is very nearly as good as VS (and consumes about a tenth of the disk space). The TDN add-in hack is not playing nice.
Mr Cansdale developed TDN using Express as a student. In order to test it, he obviously needed his add-in hack because he couldn't afford to license a full edition. This was in breach of the EULA, but I'm inclined to be forgiving of this behaviour - when I couldn't afford software, I would avoid paying for it too, but it helped me to learn and to be a productive member of society who now can afford to pay for his software. (although the vast majority of software I use is legally "free" in one way or another). On the other hand, releasing such a hack in a product that you charge money for, aiding others to break the license agreement, is not just dumb, it's software piracy. If he was distributing a keygen for VS Pro with his software, it would be little different - they are both a technical means of circumventing the license agreement.
To get his add-in to work for the Express Edition, he uses a property visualizer (which aren't disabled in Express). You have to open the property window to get his addin to run. His custom property visualizer then uses the IDE APIs to load the add-in assembly into the process, create menus, etc.
He even gave an example to the MS drone in his email correspondence, which is still up on his webserver.
While I agree that it's technically possible, it's using an extension point which was not intended to provide full add-in access. Yes, no secret APIs were abused, no reverse engineering necessary. It violates the spirit of the agreement rather than the letter (which is that technical measures to prevent add-in use should not be circumvented). They removed the add-in manager and loader, which they figured should be enough. Mr Cansdale has effectively written his own add-in loader and used an alternate technical means (otherwise known as "hack") to get it executed. The fact that the "technical measures" used to prevent add-ins from loading were not implemented in a bullet-proof manner does not change the fact that they are present, and that they have been circumvented.
Yes, I think Microsoft are being dumb - being able to run the software you want is the sales driver for any OS, and being able to develop your own is the one sure way of getting exactly the software you want. Artificially restricting the features of your development tools so your IDE team can be a profit centre is of questionable value. Removing the ability of hobbyists to use professional testing features is fostering yet another generation of sloppy programmers who will have to adjust to become professionals.
But Mr Cansdale is in the wrong, IMHO. MS agreed to "play nice" by releasing a slick, functional, professional IDE for free, despite the risks of attracting antitrust attention. Mr Cansdale has responded by thumbing his nose at the spirit of that bargain. If he really wanted a version of his product that runs in a free IDE, he could have written a version for SharpDevelop without treading on the 300-lb gorillas toes. Or he could have just kept his hack to himself (he wrote it because he was using the Express edition to develop TestDriven.NET... which is fine. But loading his add-in into the Express IDE was in violation of the EULA, even if *writing* the add-in in Express is all fine and dandy.)
By the way - the rumour that you cannot use Express to develop a commercial product is not true. There would be no point in imposing such a condition, simply because the compiler is free (beer) available. You have no means of proving that any.NET product has not been hacked together with Notepad.exe and a command line. MS quite wisely have put no restriction on the commercial sale of products written with the Express editions of their IDE.
Point 4 in the following : http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support/ faq/4. Can I use Express Editions for commercial use? Yes, there are no licensing restrictions for applications built using the Express Editions.
Case in point : my wife filled in a job application last night. The application form was a Word document (as RTF, but RTF is just a different Word format). It took her about 3 hours, and the vast majority of the time was spent transcribing information out of her CV (also a Word document) and mucking about with the formatting. She didn't at any point write any new content ; the application just wanted the form filling in, and a copy of her CV, which contained most of the data in the form to start with. And this took three hours, lots of head scratching, brow furrowing and swearing at her laptop. Wifey is not a natural computer user, but I reckon I would still have taken about 2 hours doing the same thing, with most of the time difference accounted for by use of shortcut keys and my faster typing. I would not have been performing a different task set, since there really wasn't any clever magic that would have prevented me having to do the same thing and manually transcribe everything out of her CV into the form.
What SHOULD have happened is that either the form would have been aware of typical CV data, my wife would have had a CV written in a format that understands CV data, and a button click would have filled in the form from the CV file. Or even better, the job application would just take a CV file and a covering note. The process would have taken 5 minutes instead of 3 hours, and my wife could have gotten back to enjoying a glass of wine and an episode or two of Ugly Betty. Job applications are a well-understood application domain with millions of users, but the only support Word provides for a CV is a template that provides visual formatting and ONLY visual formatting.
When my wife writes documents she obsesses about the formatting during the writing. This disrupts her flow of composition and stresses her out immensely. I really think she would benefit from using TeX instead, especially since she mostly writes academic papers. But she's stuck with the WYSIWYG paradigm because that's all she knows, and she's not willing to make an investment in computer time to improve her productivity.
I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS at university, which was probably more productive than Word. A white-on-blue plaintext terminal screen, you concentrated solely on document structure. These days the vast majority of text I type goes into an IDE, a Notepad2 window, or one of the incarnations of vim. Using HTML, even in an HTML editor, would not improve matters for me at all.
The next great phase of office productivity will come from documents with intelligent markup that states what the content is and not just what it should look like.
Each tag gets a URL. If you know the URL, you can use that. How is this not the same as having a meaningful name? Since when was a URL not a name? Incidentally, a tagging mechanism doesn't define the name - the user does. It's his responsibility to make it meaningful.
It might be a bit more long winded, but it's the same feature. And it does it very elegantly by using the same feature used for any other copy operation, which consumes no space other than a copy of the filesystem node.
To clarify, the hex images for that firmware are identical in both packages, so it looks like it is a mode switch (in the.inf file the installer uses) for the CLIX. With a 10MB software image, I'm not surprised the CLIX can fit support for both in.
You still need a different firmware for some of the smaller flash-based players to support UMS.
Or are you genuinely comparing reportage of the verifiable doubling of corn prices because of US bioethanol policy and resultant riots in Mexico, the verifiable destruction of rainforest to grow palm oil and soy beans for fuel feedstocks and the verifiable release of methane from rotting vegetation, submerged below hydroelectric reservoirs with the speculative ramblings of a journo with no statistic evidence that 2.4Ghz spectrum microwave emissions cause anything other than mild localized tissue heating?
The Amazon... some 25% of the planet's oxygen. While I deplore the destruction of the Amazon for many other reasons, it's contribution to global oxygen emissions is not one of them.
Rainforest is carbon neutral. There is such a rich and efficient ecosystem that the vast majority of organic matter is recycled in some way. The forest mass is in a steady state (where it isn't being chopped down, of course). The topsoil layer is only a few feet thick and not rich at all - which is obvious when you look at the slash and burn pattern of agriculture there. Yes, it produces a significant fraction of the world oxygen output. But it then consumes it again.
What people forget is that plants consume oxygen! They need aerobic respiration just like every other living thing. During the night, they emit carbon dioxide. They just happen to produce a surplus of oxygen as a result of their growth process, because they source carbon from atmospheric sources (i.e. CO2). Animals in the rainforest all consume any dead plant matter with immense efficiency. And the animals get eaten by smaller organisms, etc, etc. All of these steps emit the carbon that the plant biomass originally sequestered.
An ecosystem only has a positive oxygen production (and carbon sequestration) when the biomass it produces increases. The biomass of the rainforest, per hectare, remains pretty stable (until you burn it). Ergo, the rainforest is not as commonly portrayed, "the lungs of the planet". If you were to enclose it in a huge glass dome tomorrow, the human race would not suddenly keel over from lack of oxygen.
I'm not saying it doesn't have a regulatory effect. The enormous amount of water transpiration alone must effect global climate in ways that we probably don't fully understand. And it's value as one of the most biologically diverse environments on earth cannot be understated. From a selfish point of view, more cancer treatments come from the rainforest than anywhere else.
But environmental campaigners really need to focus on arguments that are not disprovable without even resorting to spin and misinformation.
Get yourself an IBM Model M or a Cherry G-80 3000, seriously. These things last. I spilt coffee in the Cherry the other week, it just kept on trucking thanks to the internal design.
They're only really in more danger because of the SUVs...
The SUV carries a great deal more mass, which makes collisions with it more energetic. Now, the SUV can expend some of that mass as extra "armor", which makes them safer for their occupants.
If everyone drove the modern day equivalent of the bubble car, with modern materials they'd be very safe - and the pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, etc, would be much safer too. Oh, and they'd save craploads of gas. Of course, this is impractical for everyone - but I'm sure that most SUV drivers could stand to lose the majority of their cargo space and most of their passenger seats. Even if you had an SUV for utility purposes, you could probably buy a small commuter vehicle for the money you'd save on gas not driving it every day....
I don't even drive.. I have a 50 mile train journey each day, which takes 2 hours either way (if I'm lucky). I could obviously drive that distance much faster if it wasn't for the ludicrous congestion at either end of the trip. I did the math and even with my teensy little 796cc engine it still costs me less on the train (even if they did raise the fare by a full 13% this year), what with parking. And on the train I can read, or even work sometimes.
But even so, I'd prefer to be able to get up an hour later in the morning, I'd even work an extra hour! A nice comfy purpose-built office space at home would be infinitely superior to the ridiculous battery-hen office where everyone gabbles and cackles and holds meetings around my desk. I can't be expected to perform duties that are based on the conjunction of creativity and focus in that environment. Even cubes would be preferable to a totally open-plan office... thank heavens for my Etymotic earplug-phones or I'd never get anything done at all.
So anyway, my point is, that the public transport in this country sucks. The typical response of the rail company to an increase in passenger numbers is to raise prices. If the price of fuel drives people off the roads (and our fuel taxes here make our gasoline roughly double the price it is in 'merca), then the trains simultaneously get more crowded, late, and expensive. The last remaining palatable option is teleworking - may everyone embrace it.
Not only that, it's the most environmentally friendly option.
Not only that, you can just get around it by printing "mark the card as played" in the manual. Anyone who's ever played Magic is going to just "tap" cards rather than carrying around a pocketful of card-marking tokens, even though it's an unlicensed use of the patent on a non Wizards of the Coast game.
It may not have been common practice, but that's more to do with the lack of card games that had cards that generate a opportunity resource each turn, rather than it being an awestruck innovation. You could just as easily implement it by...
* Having a pile on which you place "spent" cards which you redeal at the end of each turn.
* Using markers of one sort or another.
* Flip the cards
All of these methods are onerous though - they require more effort than "tapping", and you might run out of markers. Once you begin to play games with opportunity-resource cards, this becomes obvious, as does the optimal solution, which is to leave the cards in place and mark them in a way that requires no tokens. I'm sure this was how it evolved - they either started doing it during playtest sessions to avoid the use of tokens or reshuffling (which means that it's obvious to a practitioner) or they just started doing it right from the start (which means it's just plain obvious). Obviousness means it fails one of the basic tests of patentability.
Yet another example of why paying a license-granting organisation by the number of licenses they grant, rather than just billing for the cost of examination work, is a very silly idea.
Because most collisions occur in the forward direction, rear-facing seats are safer in all forms of transport. Impact is naturally dissipated against the seat back, and the head suffers a rear impact which distributes the force on the brain onto the curved rear aspect of the skull, instead of the nasty pointy injurious surface at the front of the skull.
If you could solve the perceptual problems with driving in a rear-facing seat, it would be safer for the driver. It's already safer for passengers.
I had the same thought, but I thought about it as yet another way of interfering with the second hand console game market.
Un-opaque the chip at the register. The console reads the encryption keys, whatever, from the disk, stores them in memory, and then opaques it again with its own loop. Hey presto, you have a game that can't be resold except through authorised dealers.
Yes, I support it. It's not forced - if you don't have a TV tuner, you don't have to pay it. It's not a tax (not collected by government, and the BBC is not a government organisation), it's a license fee, and if you don't watch TV, you don't have to pay. (never mind the slightly overzealous collection department).
All Britons who pay the TV license benefit from the BBC, whether they watch it or not. As I pointed out, the commercial broadcasters have to raise their game. We show 16 minutes of commercials in an hour instead of 22 as in the states, so just by having the BBC you get more TV for your money. The quality is higher (anecdotally, from every American I've ever heard comment on the relative quality of TV in each country), because the BBC doesn't jump to the tune of advertising agencies. The commercial broadcasters have to improve their quality to match, or they lose ratings.
The BBC pioneers many of the newer formats. Home improvement shows started on the BBC and rapidly spread to the commercials because they were so popular. Execs on the commercial channels are not empowered to take the risks the BBC can, but they reap all the benefits (and by extension, so do the TV watching public). Celebrity dancing shows, island survival shows, both of these are huge in the commercial market and started on the BBC, just to name a couple of examples.
I forgot to mention the BBC website too. World-class news, recipes, information, etc. etc. etc........... and free to the whole world. I'm not at all upset that my license fee pays for it - because other people using it takes nothing from me.
Yes, the BBC pays their artists. I'm fairly sure American channels also stick to this tried and tested formula, despite efforts to the contrary. That wasn't my point. My point is that if you had gone to 20 American TV execs and proposed to make a documentary-style comedy about a paper products factory in the midlands, exactly 20 would have told you where to shove it, because they'd never seen it before and were not about to take a risk on it. Whereas the BBC charter virtually demands that they take risks. Instead of contributing to the heat-death of the television market, the BBC is a constructive force.
Hell yes. As I point out elsewhere in the thread, 2 major 24/7 channels, 6 other TV channels, 11 national radio stations, a worldwide radio service, and local radio covering most of the UK for a measly $20 a month. Plus all the commercial broadcasters have to raise their game to compete - where the US shows 22 minutes of commercials in an hour, the UK terrestrial channels show a mere 16. And the general standard of programming is much higher.
Long live the BBC, I don't begrudge them the odd political advert explaining how great they are at all.
The original British version of The Office was a commission for the BBC, by the way. Yes, it was paid for, but out of a budget that costs only $20 per person monthly for that, plus two mainstream 24/7 channels, 6 other channels, 11 national radio stations, a worldwide radio station and regional radio stations covering the bulk of the UK. Most of this I can record in broadcast quality via the DVB-T cards in my MythTV box, free to air, no encryption. Plus the commercial channels, which have to raise their game to live up to this fine example.
They remade it for cultural reasons, of course, but also because it was so damn good. The remake is certainly for profit, but the original was made to fulfil the requirements of the BBC Charter (part of which is to entertain the British public).
Wifey is the biggest compu-dunce in town, and she loves MythTV.
She likes to sit and flick through the movie listings. She loves the fact that it records every episode of Scrubs.
Extremely high WAF.
Conflict resolution? Three tuners, and a small instruction to wifey to use "find one" instead of "record this". Change the background image? Why the hell would she want to do that?
Seriously, if the moaning about downtime when I'm upgrading it is anything to go by, it's by far the most adored piece of technology in the house, bar none.
You could express the opinion that since tokamak fusion requires huge amounts of engineering and is a multi-billion dollar industry in itself that the military industrial complex (emphasis on the industrial) has discouraged spending on alternatives that may produce a demonstrable over-unity reactor at a fraction of the $4.8 billion dollars (2002 dollars at that) that the DoE estimates ITER will cost.
Bussard estimates that he could complete one by 2011, ITER is slated to finish in 2013. I'd imagine that a lot of people involved in ITER would be terrified that IEC would be a viable approach ; a lot of people would look politically silly (and of course, in modern politics, your career isn't allowed to survive honest mistakes.), a lot of money might be at risk - lets face it, even if ITER remains on time and on budget, you're looking at at least a billion. If like most government projects, it runs wildly over budget and over time (lets say double), you'd be looking at losing a figure around 20 times what Bussard proposes to spend.
Yes indeed, you can see the effects that capitalization is having on the UK healthcare system. Previously envied, the so-called socialists we have in power have continued with the previous legislations ridiculous programme of privatizing public services.
IT DOESN'T WORK.
The problems of the NHS:-
1) The cost of healthcare increases all the time. As someone pointed out, you can spend an infinite amount of money on it if you try hard enough. As new treatments emerge, the vocational responsibility of the health service to deploy them increases. The two biggest costs to the NHS are manpower and drugs. The manpower costs more because the cost of living increases. The drugs cost more because Big Pharma likes to market new ones all the time to prevent the patent sun setting on their business.
2) The population in western nations is ageing. Old people cost more in healthcare. Big Pharma loves old people, because they consume lots of drugs, so they do their best to make lots of drugs that help people get older.
3) Add to this the corporate desire to make a profit. Somewhat stupidly, the government ignored this and gave private business a load of contracts to build and operate hospitals. I believe that 15% profit is considered a low margin in the healthcare market, so your budget is instantly a minimum of 15% less effective as it's being spent on not patients but shareholders.
4) Government is spending more on the NHS, but they have to contend with 1, 2 and 3, some of which is their own stupid fault.
So you have a situation where costs are rising, and third party is both dipping it's hand in the bucket and upsetting the people who provide the healthcare who are overwhelmingly vocational in the UK (ie - they actually care, because the wages and working conditions are enough to make a medical career very unattractive in the UK).
Add to this
5) Stupid government targets
Which basically ensure that people game the system around the metrics instead of actually aiming to make patients better.
And you end up with an institution full of disillusioned, overworked, overstressed staff, patients left to suffer on trolleys in corridors because there's no beds, and a contingent of fatcat shareholders who think nothing of compromising basic cleanliness in hospitals to scrape off a few more pennies.
What needs to happen is anyones guess. Here's mine:-
1) Restrict the use of expensive, unnecessary therapies like IVF.
2) Re-educate the UK populace about their health so they don't continue to overburden the system with every little sniffle.
3) Kick out the corporations. The UK has some of the worlds biggest Big Pharma. Nationalise them. Most of their research is publicly funded anyway. Then the NHS starts to reap the benefits of overseas drug sales, the prices go down, everyone is happy. Get rid of the hospital management firms who build a hospital and then charge three times it's value in leases, plus service contracts. Don't whine about contracts, you're a government, you can do what you damn well please.
I would argue most power users don't need a shell.
I'd say that power users who think they don't need a shell don't know what they're missing ; they could have a lot more power.
The gentleman sitting next to me has recently discovered and raves about WinGrep, a GUI file search/replace utility with RegExp support. It's not bad, but it can't compare with a shell - you can't, for instance, search for a bunch of files containing your desired pattern match and invoke an external utility to process each one. And anything that the original application designer didn't visualise as a feature is excluded. He's easily capable of comprehending grep and sed, which would do the same job for free, but he's more comfortable with the GUI.
In a *nix style shell, the ability to pipeline STDOUT through a whole bunch of little utils is the tool of a real power user - and it has a nice easy learning curve, you can pick up new commands as and when you like, and combine them with old favourites. The downside to the *nix shell is that very often you have to perform some esoteric text processing to get what you want, which means learning tools like awk and sed. Powershell works by passing objects through the pipeline - objects that have useful properties. It's even an improvement with old-style executables that emit pure text - the.NET String object has an API that's a lot easier than sed and awk.
The GUI equivalent of a shell for a power user would be a pipeline composer where you can take various widgets representing actions and plug them together. Perhaps something like the DTS transform designer in SQL Enterprise Manager. Or maybe not:-)
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The only thing that Express lacks is convenience features. As I pointed out above, anything you can achieve with Visual Studio, you can also achieve with Notepad.exe and the compiler, which is installed by default in the .NET Framework.
.NET framework, but you might need to write a little extra code for yourself.
If you do a bit of reading around, the VS team had to fight tooth and nail to get the Express versions released *at all*. They certainly aren't "hobbled", as you can produce fully functional applications with no licensing restrictions on them. It's not like VB6 "Control Creation Edition", which was virtually worthless, you can exercise the full power of the
Yes, I think that MS are shooting themselves in the foot. But I don't have to agree with their marketing strategy. The issue is that they made an agreement to the effect that you can use their product, just play nice and if you want the advanced features, cough up for them. In some ways I'd prefer that they made VS Professional a free download, but Express for no money at all is a bargain. If you want a free IDE with unrestricted add-in development, there's always SharpDevelop, which is very nearly as good as VS (and consumes about a tenth of the disk space). The TDN add-in hack is not playing nice.
Mr Cansdale developed TDN using Express as a student. In order to test it, he obviously needed his add-in hack because he couldn't afford to license a full edition. This was in breach of the EULA, but I'm inclined to be forgiving of this behaviour - when I couldn't afford software, I would avoid paying for it too, but it helped me to learn and to be a productive member of society who now can afford to pay for his software. (although the vast majority of software I use is legally "free" in one way or another). On the other hand, releasing such a hack in a product that you charge money for, aiding others to break the license agreement, is not just dumb, it's software piracy. If he was distributing a keygen for VS Pro with his software, it would be little different - they are both a technical means of circumventing the license agreement.
He even gave an example to the MS drone in his email correspondence, which is still up on his webserver.
http://www.mutantdesign.co.uk/downloads/ProjectRe
While I agree that it's technically possible, it's using an extension point which was not intended to provide full add-in access. Yes, no secret APIs were abused, no reverse engineering necessary. It violates the spirit of the agreement rather than the letter (which is that technical measures to prevent add-in use should not be circumvented). They removed the add-in manager and loader, which they figured should be enough. Mr Cansdale has effectively written his own add-in loader and used an alternate technical means (otherwise known as "hack") to get it executed. The fact that the "technical measures" used to prevent add-ins from loading were not implemented in a bullet-proof manner does not change the fact that they are present, and that they have been circumvented.
Yes, I think Microsoft are being dumb - being able to run the software you want is the sales driver for any OS, and being able to develop your own is the one sure way of getting exactly the software you want. Artificially restricting the features of your development tools so your IDE team can be a profit centre is of questionable value. Removing the ability of hobbyists to use professional testing features is fostering yet another generation of sloppy programmers who will have to adjust to become professionals.
But Mr Cansdale is in the wrong, IMHO. MS agreed to "play nice" by releasing a slick, functional, professional IDE for free, despite the risks of attracting antitrust attention. Mr Cansdale has responded by thumbing his nose at the spirit of that bargain. If he really wanted a version of his product that runs in a free IDE, he could have written a version for SharpDevelop without treading on the 300-lb gorillas toes. Or he could have just kept his hack to himself (he wrote it because he was using the Express edition to develop TestDriven.NET
By the way - the rumour that you cannot use Express to develop a commercial product is not true. There would be no point in imposing such a condition, simply because the compiler is free (beer) available. You have no means of proving that any
Point 4 in the following :
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/support
Yes, there are no licensing restrictions for applications built using the Express Editions.
What is really bullshit is writing documents purely in terms of appearance.
http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
Case in point : my wife filled in a job application last night. The application form was a Word document (as RTF, but RTF is just a different Word format). It took her about 3 hours, and the vast majority of the time was spent transcribing information out of her CV (also a Word document) and mucking about with the formatting. She didn't at any point write any new content ; the application just wanted the form filling in, and a copy of her CV, which contained most of the data in the form to start with. And this took three hours, lots of head scratching, brow furrowing and swearing at her laptop. Wifey is not a natural computer user, but I reckon I would still have taken about 2 hours doing the same thing, with most of the time difference accounted for by use of shortcut keys and my faster typing. I would not have been performing a different task set, since there really wasn't any clever magic that would have prevented me having to do the same thing and manually transcribe everything out of her CV into the form.
What SHOULD have happened is that either the form would have been aware of typical CV data, my wife would have had a CV written in a format that understands CV data, and a button click would have filled in the form from the CV file. Or even better, the job application would just take a CV file and a covering note. The process would have taken 5 minutes instead of 3 hours, and my wife could have gotten back to enjoying a glass of wine and an episode or two of Ugly Betty. Job applications are a well-understood application domain with millions of users, but the only support Word provides for a CV is a template that provides visual formatting and ONLY visual formatting.
When my wife writes documents she obsesses about the formatting during the writing. This disrupts her flow of composition and stresses her out immensely. I really think she would benefit from using TeX instead, especially since she mostly writes academic papers. But she's stuck with the WYSIWYG paradigm because that's all she knows, and she's not willing to make an investment in computer time to improve her productivity.
I used to use WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS at university, which was probably more productive than Word. A white-on-blue plaintext terminal screen, you concentrated solely on document structure. These days the vast majority of text I type goes into an IDE, a Notepad2 window, or one of the incarnations of vim. Using HTML, even in an HTML editor, would not improve matters for me at all.
The next great phase of office productivity will come from documents with intelligent markup that states what the content is and not just what it should look like.
Each tag gets a URL. If you know the URL, you can use that. How is this not the same as having a meaningful name? Since when was a URL not a name? Incidentally, a tagging mechanism doesn't define the name - the user does. It's his responsibility to make it meaningful.
svn co svn:/host/project/tags/VERSION_1_1
svn diff svn:/host/project/tags/VERSION_1_0 svn:/host/project/tags/VERSION_1_1
It might be a bit more long winded, but it's the same feature. And it does it very elegantly by using the same feature used for any other copy operation, which consumes no space other than a copy of the filesystem node.
To clarify, the hex images for that firmware are identical in both packages, so it looks like it is a mode switch (in the .inf file the installer uses) for the CLIX. With a 10MB software image, I'm not surprised the CLIX can fit support for both in.
You still need a different firmware for some of the smaller flash-based players to support UMS.
Link to the latest CLIX UMS firmware._ ENG_UM_OK.ZIP
http://www.iriverplus.com/tools/UMS/U/U20CLIX/U20
Some iRiver players have one firmware for MTP, one for UMS
This page maintains a list of updates for iRiver players.
http://nyaochi.sakura.ne.jp/iriverupdate/
Or are you genuinely comparing reportage of the verifiable doubling of corn prices because of US bioethanol policy and resultant riots in Mexico, the verifiable destruction of rainforest to grow palm oil and soy beans for fuel feedstocks and the verifiable release of methane from rotting vegetation, submerged below hydroelectric reservoirs with the speculative ramblings of a journo with no statistic evidence that 2.4Ghz spectrum microwave emissions cause anything other than mild localized tissue heating?
Rainforest is carbon neutral. There is such a rich and efficient ecosystem that the vast majority of organic matter is recycled in some way. The forest mass is in a steady state (where it isn't being chopped down, of course). The topsoil layer is only a few feet thick and not rich at all - which is obvious when you look at the slash and burn pattern of agriculture there. Yes, it produces a significant fraction of the world oxygen output. But it then consumes it again.
What people forget is that plants consume oxygen! They need aerobic respiration just like every other living thing. During the night, they emit carbon dioxide. They just happen to produce a surplus of oxygen as a result of their growth process, because they source carbon from atmospheric sources (i.e. CO2). Animals in the rainforest all consume any dead plant matter with immense efficiency. And the animals get eaten by smaller organisms, etc, etc. All of these steps emit the carbon that the plant biomass originally sequestered.
An ecosystem only has a positive oxygen production (and carbon sequestration) when the biomass it produces increases. The biomass of the rainforest, per hectare, remains pretty stable (until you burn it). Ergo, the rainforest is not as commonly portrayed, "the lungs of the planet". If you were to enclose it in a huge glass dome tomorrow, the human race would not suddenly keel over from lack of oxygen.
I'm not saying it doesn't have a regulatory effect. The enormous amount of water transpiration alone must effect global climate in ways that we probably don't fully understand. And it's value as one of the most biologically diverse environments on earth cannot be understated. From a selfish point of view, more cancer treatments come from the rainforest than anywhere else.
But environmental campaigners really need to focus on arguments that are not disprovable without even resorting to spin and misinformation.
Get yourself an IBM Model M or a Cherry G-80 3000, seriously. These things last. I spilt coffee in the Cherry the other week, it just kept on trucking thanks to the internal design.
They're only really in more danger because of the SUVs...
The SUV carries a great deal more mass, which makes collisions with it more energetic. Now, the SUV can expend some of that mass as extra "armor", which makes them safer for their occupants.
If everyone drove the modern day equivalent of the bubble car, with modern materials they'd be very safe - and the pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, etc, would be much safer too. Oh, and they'd save craploads of gas. Of course, this is impractical for everyone - but I'm sure that most SUV drivers could stand to lose the majority of their cargo space and most of their passenger seats. Even if you had an SUV for utility purposes, you could probably buy a small commuter vehicle for the money you'd save on gas not driving it every day....
I really hope it takes off.
I don't even drive.. I have a 50 mile train journey each day, which takes 2 hours either way (if I'm lucky). I could obviously drive that distance much faster if it wasn't for the ludicrous congestion at either end of the trip. I did the math and even with my teensy little 796cc engine it still costs me less on the train (even if they did raise the fare by a full 13% this year), what with parking. And on the train I can read, or even work sometimes.
But even so, I'd prefer to be able to get up an hour later in the morning, I'd even work an extra hour! A nice comfy purpose-built office space at home would be infinitely superior to the ridiculous battery-hen office where everyone gabbles and cackles and holds meetings around my desk. I can't be expected to perform duties that are based on the conjunction of creativity and focus in that environment. Even cubes would be preferable to a totally open-plan office... thank heavens for my Etymotic earplug-phones or I'd never get anything done at all.
So anyway, my point is, that the public transport in this country sucks. The typical response of the rail company to an increase in passenger numbers is to raise prices. If the price of fuel drives people off the roads (and our fuel taxes here make our gasoline roughly double the price it is in 'merca), then the trains simultaneously get more crowded, late, and expensive. The last remaining palatable option is teleworking - may everyone embrace it.
Not only that, it's the most environmentally friendly option.
He could have JFKs, if only "They" hadn't misplaced them in the National Archives next to the Ark of the Covenant.
It's utterly ludicrous, isn't it.
Not only that, you can just get around it by printing "mark the card as played" in the manual. Anyone who's ever played Magic is going to just "tap" cards rather than carrying around a pocketful of card-marking tokens, even though it's an unlicensed use of the patent on a non Wizards of the Coast game.
It may not have been common practice, but that's more to do with the lack of card games that had cards that generate a opportunity resource each turn, rather than it being an awestruck innovation. You could just as easily implement it by...
* Having a pile on which you place "spent" cards which you redeal at the end of each turn.
* Using markers of one sort or another.
* Flip the cards
All of these methods are onerous though - they require more effort than "tapping", and you might run out of markers. Once you begin to play games with opportunity-resource cards, this becomes obvious, as does the optimal solution, which is to leave the cards in place and mark them in a way that requires no tokens. I'm sure this was how it evolved - they either started doing it during playtest sessions to avoid the use of tokens or reshuffling (which means that it's obvious to a practitioner) or they just started doing it right from the start (which means it's just plain obvious). Obviousness means it fails one of the basic tests of patentability.
Yet another example of why paying a license-granting organisation by the number of licenses they grant, rather than just billing for the cost of examination work, is a very silly idea.
Because most collisions occur in the forward direction, rear-facing seats are safer in all forms of transport. Impact is naturally dissipated against the seat back, and the head suffers a rear impact which distributes the force on the brain onto the curved rear aspect of the skull, instead of the nasty pointy injurious surface at the front of the skull.
If you could solve the perceptual problems with driving in a rear-facing seat, it would be safer for the driver. It's already safer for passengers.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2007/20070511.j pg
I had the same thought, but I thought about it as yet another way of interfering with the second hand console game market.
Un-opaque the chip at the register. The console reads the encryption keys, whatever, from the disk, stores them in memory, and then opaques it again with its own loop. Hey presto, you have a game that can't be resold except through authorised dealers.
Yes, I support it. It's not forced - if you don't have a TV tuner, you don't have to pay it. It's not a tax (not collected by government, and the BBC is not a government organisation), it's a license fee, and if you don't watch TV, you don't have to pay. (never mind the slightly overzealous collection department).
.......... and free to the whole world. I'm not at all upset that my license fee pays for it - because other people using it takes nothing from me.
All Britons who pay the TV license benefit from the BBC, whether they watch it or not. As I pointed out, the commercial broadcasters have to raise their game. We show 16 minutes of commercials in an hour instead of 22 as in the states, so just by having the BBC you get more TV for your money. The quality is higher (anecdotally, from every American I've ever heard comment on the relative quality of TV in each country), because the BBC doesn't jump to the tune of advertising agencies. The commercial broadcasters have to improve their quality to match, or they lose ratings.
The BBC pioneers many of the newer formats. Home improvement shows started on the BBC and rapidly spread to the commercials because they were so popular. Execs on the commercial channels are not empowered to take the risks the BBC can, but they reap all the benefits (and by extension, so do the TV watching public). Celebrity dancing shows, island survival shows, both of these are huge in the commercial market and started on the BBC, just to name a couple of examples.
I forgot to mention the BBC website too. World-class news, recipes, information, etc. etc. etc.
Yes, the BBC pays their artists. I'm fairly sure American channels also stick to this tried and tested formula, despite efforts to the contrary. That wasn't my point. My point is that if you had gone to 20 American TV execs and proposed to make a documentary-style comedy about a paper products factory in the midlands, exactly 20 would have told you where to shove it, because they'd never seen it before and were not about to take a risk on it. Whereas the BBC charter virtually demands that they take risks. Instead of contributing to the heat-death of the television market, the BBC is a constructive force.
Hell yes. As I point out elsewhere in the thread, 2 major 24/7 channels, 6 other TV channels, 11 national radio stations, a worldwide radio service, and local radio covering most of the UK for a measly $20 a month. Plus all the commercial broadcasters have to raise their game to compete - where the US shows 22 minutes of commercials in an hour, the UK terrestrial channels show a mere 16. And the general standard of programming is much higher.
Long live the BBC, I don't begrudge them the odd political advert explaining how great they are at all.
The original British version of The Office was a commission for the BBC, by the way. Yes, it was paid for, but out of a budget that costs only $20 per person monthly for that, plus two mainstream 24/7 channels, 6 other channels, 11 national radio stations, a worldwide radio station and regional radio stations covering the bulk of the UK. Most of this I can record in broadcast quality via the DVB-T cards in my MythTV box, free to air, no encryption. Plus the commercial channels, which have to raise their game to live up to this fine example.
They remade it for cultural reasons, of course, but also because it was so damn good. The remake is certainly for profit, but the original was made to fulfil the requirements of the BBC Charter (part of which is to entertain the British public).
Wifey is the biggest compu-dunce in town, and she loves MythTV.
She likes to sit and flick through the movie listings. She loves the fact that it records every episode of Scrubs.
Extremely high WAF.
Conflict resolution? Three tuners, and a small instruction to wifey to use "find one" instead of "record this". Change the background image? Why the hell would she want to do that?
Seriously, if the moaning about downtime when I'm upgrading it is anything to go by, it's by far the most adored piece of technology in the house, bar none.
You could express the opinion that since tokamak fusion requires huge amounts of engineering and is a multi-billion dollar industry in itself that the military industrial complex (emphasis on the industrial) has discouraged spending on alternatives that may produce a demonstrable over-unity reactor at a fraction of the $4.8 billion dollars (2002 dollars at that) that the DoE estimates ITER will cost.
Bussard estimates that he could complete one by 2011, ITER is slated to finish in 2013. I'd imagine that a lot of people involved in ITER would be terrified that IEC would be a viable approach ; a lot of people would look politically silly (and of course, in modern politics, your career isn't allowed to survive honest mistakes.), a lot of money might be at risk - lets face it, even if ITER remains on time and on budget, you're looking at at least a billion. If like most government projects, it runs wildly over budget and over time (lets say double), you'd be looking at losing a figure around 20 times what Bussard proposes to spend.
I wish I had a million modpoints. And I could give them all to you, so this post would be the first thing you saw on slashdot for the rest of time.
Yes indeed, you can see the effects that capitalization is having on the UK healthcare system. Previously envied, the so-called socialists we have in power have continued with the previous legislations ridiculous programme of privatizing public services.
:-
:-
IT DOESN'T WORK.
The problems of the NHS
1) The cost of healthcare increases all the time. As someone pointed out, you can spend an infinite amount of money on it if you try hard enough. As new treatments emerge, the vocational responsibility of the health service to deploy them increases. The two biggest costs to the NHS are manpower and drugs. The manpower costs more because the cost of living increases. The drugs cost more because Big Pharma likes to market new ones all the time to prevent the patent sun setting on their business.
2) The population in western nations is ageing. Old people cost more in healthcare. Big Pharma loves old people, because they consume lots of drugs, so they do their best to make lots of drugs that help people get older.
3) Add to this the corporate desire to make a profit. Somewhat stupidly, the government ignored this and gave private business a load of contracts to build and operate hospitals. I believe that 15% profit is considered a low margin in the healthcare market, so your budget is instantly a minimum of 15% less effective as it's being spent on not patients but shareholders.
4) Government is spending more on the NHS, but they have to contend with 1, 2 and 3, some of which is their own stupid fault.
So you have a situation where costs are rising, and third party is both dipping it's hand in the bucket and upsetting the people who provide the healthcare who are overwhelmingly vocational in the UK (ie - they actually care, because the wages and working conditions are enough to make a medical career very unattractive in the UK).
Add to this
5) Stupid government targets
Which basically ensure that people game the system around the metrics instead of actually aiming to make patients better.
And you end up with an institution full of disillusioned, overworked, overstressed staff, patients left to suffer on trolleys in corridors because there's no beds, and a contingent of fatcat shareholders who think nothing of compromising basic cleanliness in hospitals to scrape off a few more pennies.
What needs to happen is anyones guess. Here's mine
1) Restrict the use of expensive, unnecessary therapies like IVF.
2) Re-educate the UK populace about their health so they don't continue to overburden the system with every little sniffle.
3) Kick out the corporations. The UK has some of the worlds biggest Big Pharma. Nationalise them. Most of their research is publicly funded anyway. Then the NHS starts to reap the benefits of overseas drug sales, the prices go down, everyone is happy. Get rid of the hospital management firms who build a hospital and then charge three times it's value in leases, plus service contracts. Don't whine about contracts, you're a government, you can do what you damn well please.
Although it's rather belated, I did find this.
http://www.idquantique.com/products/quantis.htm
This is possibly the most impressively elegant solution for computer RNG that I've seen. High bitrate, and doesn't contain nasty radioisotopes.
I would argue most power users don't need a shell.
.NET String object has an API that's a lot easier than sed and awk.
:-)
I'd say that power users who think they don't need a shell don't know what they're missing ; they could have a lot more power.
The gentleman sitting next to me has recently discovered and raves about WinGrep, a GUI file search/replace utility with RegExp support. It's not bad, but it can't compare with a shell - you can't, for instance, search for a bunch of files containing your desired pattern match and invoke an external utility to process each one. And anything that the original application designer didn't visualise as a feature is excluded. He's easily capable of comprehending grep and sed, which would do the same job for free, but he's more comfortable with the GUI.
In a *nix style shell, the ability to pipeline STDOUT through a whole bunch of little utils is the tool of a real power user - and it has a nice easy learning curve, you can pick up new commands as and when you like, and combine them with old favourites. The downside to the *nix shell is that very often you have to perform some esoteric text processing to get what you want, which means learning tools like awk and sed. Powershell works by passing objects through the pipeline - objects that have useful properties. It's even an improvement with old-style executables that emit pure text - the
The GUI equivalent of a shell for a power user would be a pipeline composer where you can take various widgets representing actions and plug them together. Perhaps something like the DTS transform designer in SQL Enterprise Manager. Or maybe not